Vehicle design has advanced to a state in which occupant comfort and convenience, sometimes called ergonomics or human factors, is on at least an even par with the transportive aspects of a vehicle. This evolution has been driven by the availability of new technologies, including instrument panel clusters, adjustable steering wheels and columns, vehicle electronics, and movable seats, to mention only a few. With the addition of each new technology to the automotive vehicle environment, however, has come additional complexity in packaging the various occupant appurtenances to best achieve both design and ergonomic functionality.
One aspect of this packaging task is to provide an occupant, particularly a vehicle driver, with sufficient reach access for operation of vehicle controls. That is, a vehicle design goal is to position vehicle systems, such as radio controls, lighting controls, seat belts, a manual gear shift, and the like, within a seated occupant's reach without need for forward or backward adjustment. Current practice relies on various methods to determine whether a proposed design meets preferred reach requirements. Typically, a proposed design is analyzed in two-dimensions which requires many "cuts" of a drawing. A three-dimensional "buck" is also used to give a better overall view of the design, but such physical representations are expensive, time consuming, and difficult to modify for a subsequent design. Since there may be many individual components which affect occupant reach, the tasks associated with capturing all of the required human reach factors packaging requirements are daunting. For example, a single maximum push button study, which determines whether push button controls on the instrument panel are reachable by a given occupant, can require several hours to complete. In total, performing human factors reach studies typically requires many weeks under current practice, assuming the availability of experienced analysts to conduct all of the individual studies.
An additional problem with current design practice is that it leaves room for errors, due to the complex instructions required to perform the studies. Current design practice also is inflexible in that a change in one component, even a minor component, requires all human factors reach studies to be redone, resulting in greater expense and delay of design completion.